


it will be a heaven of black-red roses

by light_loves_the_dark



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Adopted Peter Parker, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, IronWidow - Freeform, My Ongoing Headcanon that Nat Saved Tony in Siberia, Natasha Adopted Peter Parker, Peter is Confused about Ironwidow, Peter is a Little Shit, Prompt Fill, Protective Natasha Romanov, Protective Peter Parker, Tony is cute, Tumblr Prompt, Uncle Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 05:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18514735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_loves_the_dark/pseuds/light_loves_the_dark
Summary: “We’re going to Germany.” Tony laughs when he tells him that he can’t go because of homework. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.”Peter sighs, knowing this is his chance for his mom to finally take him seriously. There’s a 98% chance she’ll kill him, but Peter thinks Tony might get the brunt of her rage in this particular case, so this might be his best chance. Tony and his mom might be friends, but no one recruits her child into a war. So he considers Tony’s words before coming to a conclusion. “Okay, but I need to know one thing.”“What’s that, kid?”“Is, uh… is the Black Widow on your side?”-aka the one where nat adopted a super soldier baby and it all comes to a head in an airport in germany. oh, and tony is totally in love with his mom, and pete's onto him.





	it will be a heaven of black-red roses

**Author's Note:**

> fulfilling this prompt: can i request nat adopting peter when he was a few weeks old and she never brings the men she dates around peter bc she’s very protective over him but he’s not dumb and still knows and then when peters about 16 he’s gets suspicious when nats been spending a little too much time with tony stark and tracks them down on a date with his spider suit?
> 
> I really wanted to make this into something long because honestly it deserves it - such a good idea!! Okay, for the purposes of this story - May Parker is an ex deep cover SHIELD agent and Nat saves her life and her son’s - so now Peter lives with May when Nat’s on a mission or with the avengers because it’s not safe for anyone to know he exists.
> 
> *also I modified the prompt a little because I don’t really see Natasha dating in the traditional sense, so there’s never really men that she brings around, but she definitely doesn’t talk about her job around peter.
> 
> title from ee cummings

_if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have_  
_one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor_  
_a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but_  
_it will be a heaven of black-red roses_

_..._

_(suddenly in sunlight_  
_he will bow,  
_ _& the whole garden will bow)_

 

_-_

 

Natasha kills the last Red Room agent in the compound with a close-range shot between the eyes. This is the first selfish mission she has done since SHIELD reprogrammed her and set her loose on the world four years ago - Fury had given her a leave of absence, knowing she would use it to take down as many of her abusers as possible. 

She is lighting the match to burn the place to the ground when she hears him for the first time. 

She drops the match and finds the baby, who looks up at her with tired eyes and a soft, toothless smile before falling asleep immediately in her arms. Natasha doesn’t smile back, but she feels her iron heart shift in her chest, beating at the thought of something she knows she will never have.

She shakes these thoughts away. Time to find a satisfactory orphanage. 

Two hours later, Natasha is on the steps of an orphanage in the nice part of town with a little basket, the boy changed and redressed in stolen clothes, still sleepy in her arms. She is lowering him into the basket when it happens. 

The boy whines at the loss of Natasha’s warmth, reaching up and tugging her hair. Natasha feels a sharp pain on her scalp; when the boy’s hand comes away, he is tightly gripping a huge chunk of red strands. Natasha gapes at him.

Several hours later in her hotel room, Natasha has tested the boy as many ways as she could before coming to the conclusion that the Red Room had somehow injected a super soldier serum into a baby. Then she finds the spider bite; when she had been around, the radioactive spider had been a distant dream. The baby babbles, still grinning at her. The sounds he is making pierce her armor, making her smile back at him despite her worry. When would the Red Room stop? Their latest victim, this sweet little child, would never be normal. Playdates and preschool would be alien to him. With these thoughts running through her mind, she stares at the boy for a long time.

“I can’t leave you here,” she murmurs to the boy, who looks back at her with guileless eyes. “But you can’t come with me either.”

The boy makes a wordless noise, reaching for her.

“Oh no,” Natasha tells the boy, unable to hold back a soft smile. “That’s not going to convince me, even if, like me, you have a little something of the arachnid in you.”

Hours pass as she thinks, before she calls the one man she trusts. After listening to all her thoughts and worries, he laughs. 

Suffice to say, he eventually convinces her. After she hangs up with Agent Barton, Natasha pages the one woman in her life that seems to have her shit together.

“May, I need to call in that favor you owe me…”

 

-

 

“Peter, your mother’s checking in!”

Pyotr Romanoff, or Peter Parker to everyone except his mother and his Uncle Clint, tears his eyes from the screen detailing the horrors of the Battle of New York, as they are now calling it. His mother hasn’t called since they had left the helicarrier for the fight, and even then, only for thirty seconds to tell them to get into the panic room. Peter had wanted to go help as one of the only successful super soldier experiments, but apparently, as he is still a twelve year old, May still had the right to jam a sedative in his neck and drag him into the panic room against his will.

Now, Peter vaults over the couch to take the phone from May, plastering it to his ear. “Mom? Mama, are you okay? What happened?”

His mother sounds exhausted, but safe. “I’m okay, Petya. And you? May? Your brother?”

“All good,” Peter confirms. “Are you coming by soon?”

Natasha sighs. “There’s a lot left to do here, pauchok, but I’ll be there as soon as I can - I need to see you.”

Peter is getting ready to reply when he hears a voice in the background. “Romanoff, get off your ass - we’re going to dinner.”

And then his mother, in her sultry fake voice that Peter hates: “I don’t know, Tony, I might trust you to catch me when I’m falling out of the sky, but your food selections leave a lot to be desired.”

Peter gapes. “You fell out of the sky? Wait, Tony, as in Tony Stark? Get me an autograph!”

His mom ignores him, listening to Tony (Stark!) as he replies. “Okay, Red, you can’t talk - I had to eat your weird Russian cooking for several months when you were Natalie because Pepper liked it so much.” Peter snorts in agreement; her cooking really is weird. 

“Hush,” she murmurs to him. “That’s because Miss Potts has taste,” his mom retorts louder, smug with a teasing note to her voice that Peter rarely hears. 

That should’ve been his first hint that this wasn’t just a working relationship. 

Tony’s voice drops a little lower, also changing into something that Peter has never heard, despite watching every single clip of this man on YouTube. “C’mon Nat- I wanna talk on the way. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

His mother’s tone goes warm in response, and Peter would kill to see the expressions on their faces. “Give me one more minute, Tony.”

“Tell Fury I said hi,” he shouts on the way out. As Peter anticipates, Natasha doesn’t bother to correct him. 

“I’ve got to go, baby,” his mother tells him, the warmth in her voice going from reserved to blinding. Peter thinks about his mother for a moment, about how strong and amazing she is. She had saved him, raised him with May’s help, and now she is protecting the world. He presses his face closer to the receiver, as if pretending to be closer to her. 

“Mama?” His voice is high, uncertain, but he doesn’t care. 

“Yeah?”

“Are you an Avenger?”

Natasha sighs. “We’ll talk about it soon, I promise.”

“Mama?” Natasha doesn’t respond, but he can tell that she is waiting for him to finish. His mother deserves the world. “You deserve to be,” he says aloud. 

He can hear his mother smile. “I’ll see about that autograph, okay?”

She hangs up, and Peter throws himself on his bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Wow, his mom is an Avenger.

 

-

 

When Peter finds Tony Stark in his living room, he nearly faints.

May, as an ex deep cover agent, plays her role to a tee, rolling her eyes at him to help him relax when Tony looks down at his phone to send a text. He figures Tony is there because he discovered that the Black Widow is his mother. When Peter finds out that it’s because he discovered that Peter is Spiderman, Peter nearly faints again. May must actually think Peter, through some ungodly measure of chance, actually applied to a Stark internship and got it on his own merit. Peter is just glad his adopted brother is at track practice - he would have been horribly suspicious. 

If May, and by extension, Natasha, find out that he’s going around in a flimsy cloth suit trying to convince them that he’s worthy of being a superhero, he’s going to be locked in a tower for the rest of his life. And unlike Rapunzel, he would never be given an opening to escape. No hair, no princes, no friendly lizards that change color. 

“We’re going to Germany,” Tony tells him, laughing when he tells him that he can’t go because of homework. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.” 

Peter sighs, knowing this is his chance for his mom to finally take him seriously. There’s a 98% chance she’ll kill him, but Peter thinks Tony might get the brunt of her rage in this particular case, so this might be his best chance. Tony and his mom might be friends, but no one recruits her child into a war. Or whatever Captain America is trying to pull off. 

So he considers Tony’s words before coming to a conclusion. “Okay, but I need to know one thing.”

“What’s that, kid?”

“Is, uh… is the Black Widow on your side?” His mom had told him that the Accords were splitting up the Avengers, but she hadn’t said anything about which side she had decided to take.

Tony just looks at him, disbelieving. “Yeah,” he says slowly, drawing out the word before pinning Peter with an intense stare. “Why, is that a dealbreaker for you? It’s not because she’s hot, right? Because, kid, she’s way out of your league and not just in the looks department.” 

Peter throws up a little in his mouth, letting out a shaky laugh that would convince no one. “No! No - I mean, she’s beautiful, of course, and she’s obviously way more than her looks, because, yeah… she just seems like she has her head on straight?”

Tony watches him flounder with a raised eyebrow. “And I don’t?” He asks, when Peter finally seems to run out of words. 

Peter freaks out at the idea that his idol thinks he doesn’t like him, and blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind: “Well, um, you did recruit a 15 year old for a mission against Captain America.”

Tony’s mouth turns up at the edges, but it is a strained smile. “Point taken. Well, Widow’s backing me, for once. It’s unprecedented. Pack your bags.”

 

-

 

Peter flips over their heads, Cap’s shield in his grasp, and refuses to look at his mom. 

As Peter had assumed, she realizes who he is within minutes, her eyes growing dark and stormy when she hears his voice. But within those same minutes, he also realizes something. When she gets thrown, Iron Man is at her side before he can swing across to protect her. When they need to move the fight elsewhere, Iron Man picks his mom up without a single word, his movements efficient and gentle. And maybe Natasha doesn’t realize it, but she wraps an arm around his shoulder when he does so. Easy. Natural. 

When General Rhodes goes down, his mother looks stricken for a moment before slinging an arm around Peter’s shoulders. It’s not a comforting gesture; the Black Widow looks back at him with her calculating eyes. 

“There’s a car parked about four hundred feet west. Get us there, now.” Peter nods, hearing the sound of the feds in the distance. Web shoots out from his wrists and he keeps an arm tight around his mom, swinging the distance within two minutes. The Black Widow types a command into a hidden keyboard on her wrist, and he can’t help but read the message over her shoulder.

 

_ Have P. Rdv Wed. Sorry. _

 

But once they are in the car, Peter has no time to ask his mother about the clear likelihood that she is involved with Tony Stark. Instead, he sits through several hours of lecture on becoming a superhero without her approval. Any other time, he thinks, maybe she would’ve been at least a little proud. 

But Rhodey’s lack of movement, his fall, Tony’s scream - he can see them behind her eyes as she talks to him in that low, scary voice of hers. 

She makes sure he’s safe, like she always does. Then she leaves him to fix things. 

Sadly, some part of him truly believed that she could. 

 

-

 

Despite Natasha’s order to get some sleep, Peter waits up for her in the safe house in Sweden; she had dropped him off before heading to places unknown to try to fix things between Steve and Tony. 

When she brings a beaten and bruised Tony through the door, both their heads hanging low, Peter knows that his mother, the most capable person he’s ever known, has failed. He waits for her to settle Tony in the bedroom, check in (likely with Clint), as well as eat and take a quick nap. 

An hour later, when she wakes up, he paces in front of her. She looks far more tired than he’s ever seen, and that’s when he makes a plan.

Teasing. Teasing is good. 

“... Mom, I don’t know about this guy.” Peter’s eyes twinkle, and he sees his mom’s lips lift a little at the corners. 

Then, she rolls her eyes at him. “Petya, if I had said a week ago that I thought Tony Stark was even a little annoying, you wouldn’t have spoken to me for a year.”

Peter throws himself onto the couch in their hotel room. “Yeah, but that’s before I knew he had designs on my mom!”

Natasha smirks. “Designs? How do you know it is not me that has designs on him?”

Peter gags. Clearly, his teasing plan has backfired. “Gross, Mom!” 

A long bout of coughing interrupts their conversation, and they turn to see a wide-eyed and open-mouthed Tony standing in the doorway to the master bedroom. “I…” he trails off, speechless in a manner which is so uncharacteristic of the Tony Stark that Peter has imagined that he can’t hold back nervous laughter. “What the hell is going on here?” Tony manages. 

His mom looks as nervous as he’s ever seen, but he’s sure that Tony is reading it as a blank mask. “Peter is my son.”

Tony sputters. “Spider-kid is your son?”

Natasha glares at him. “Spider-kid,” she repeats, slowly and meaningfully, reminding Peter that he is grounded for life. 

Tony takes a break from being completely floored to wink at Peter. “Kid, you’re in hot water.”

Peter stands, awkwardly crossing his arms. “So are you! Explain… this!” He says, gesturing frantically between Natasha and Tony. “Since when is  _ this  _ a thing?”

Tony crosses his arms. “Uh, no, I think the much more pressing topic, Mr. Parker, is why you just called the Black Widow  _ ‘mom’ _ ?”

“Mr. Romanoff.” Tony turns to look at Natasha, who looks back at him with an uncharacteristically vulnerable expression. “It’s Peter Romanoff - or Pyotr, if we’re being facetious.”

The slightly betrayed look on Tony’s face fades, and he uncrosses his arms and crosses the room to stand in front of her. “When you told me you had a son…” he trails off, a deep and serious tone to his voice that makes Peter feel like he’s intruding.

Sure enough, his mother meets his eye over Tony’s shoulder. “Pauchok, could you give us a minute?” She requests. Peter nods, going into the bedroom and shutting the door. After the voices start up again, he presses his ear to the crack between the door and the wall. 

“I thought he would be, I don’t know, _ smaller _ . Nat, how old were you when you had him?” Tony, still quiet and serious. He sounds engaged, earnest.

“I found him. On one of my missions. They experimented-” His mother’s voice cuts off abruptly, and Peter longs to run out and give her a hug. 

“Jeez, Nat.” 

When Natasha speaks again, it is halting and strange. “Are you- can you-”

Tony exhales, and without a facial expression Peter has no context. Is it relief? Is it sadness? Is he about to reject her? Peter loves everything about Tony Stark, but he has no qualms dropping him off the roof of this hotel. 

“This is the worst time - I mean, isn’t it?” Tony laughs; it is short and breathless. “I just got beaten up by my friend because he was defended a guy who killed my parents - a guy that I can’t even really blame for it because he was tortured by Nazis for decades. Had to watch you switch sides to save lives. Had to watch my best friend fall from the sky and nearly die. But you came to get me. And the kid? He’s great, Nat. You did a great job.”

“Tony…” Natasha says carefully. “We’ve been together for a year now.” Peter nearly bangs his head against the door. A whole  _ year _ ? “I can tell when you’re avoiding the question.”

Tony laughs again, but this one is clearly self-deprecating. “Can I, you asked? Can I accept Pete? He’s a science nerd and a cool kid, and I have huge labs and ooze coolness - that’s easy. Can I help you get reinstated? The world needs the Avengers - easy part two. Can I forgive you?” He pauses here, and Peter strains to hear. “We need to talk, but I understand why you did what you did. It’s been a rough couple of days, but of course, Nat.” His voice is warm and soft, like honey and something else that squeezes Peter’s heart. “Of course. I love you.” He stops for a moment. “Is it too soon? Probably, but I don’t care - I love you.” 

Peter can’t stand it anymore. He peeks through the door in time to see his mother step into Tony’s arms, face buried in his chest in a way that leaves her vulnerable to attack. Peter can tell, because she’s drilled advanced self-defense protocols into him for so many years. She isn’t alone though; Tony looks down at her in his arms, as if somehow surprised she is there. Eventually, he drops his chin onto the place where her forehead meets her hairline. He breathes something that even Peter, with his super hearing, can’t detect. Now, he thinks, they are both vulnerable. If something came through the window or the door, they wouldn’t have time to prepare. 

Peter guesses he’ll just have to do the protecting. 

Well, after he gets them to break apart, because honestly, this is a little weird. 

“Okay, guys, I love this, but you know what else I love? American cheeseburgers. And you can’t find them in Sweden, so can we maybe go back to cheeseburger country?” Sure enough, they break apart with a sigh, though Peter respects Tony for keeping his cool and his hand on Natasha’s lower back, reminding her that he’s still there. It’s something Peter does sometimes too; evidently, Tony has also discovered how Natasha is secretly tactile. “Anyway, I actually don’t want to know about you guys anymore; please don’t tell me anything.” He turns to Tony with a sly grin. “Although, does this mean I can call you dad now?”

Tony doesn’t miss a beat, which is extremely disappointing. “Ask your mom, bucko,” he shoots back with a grin, though there is a softness to it to which Peter has not been privy before now. 

And standing there, gazing at the two people that he idolizes the most as they share a warm smile, Peter suddenly knows that everything is going to be okay. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is a little different from my normal stuff, but hopefully a nice breather going into endgame!! i hope you all enjoyed <3


End file.
